RESTIVENESS AMONG YOUTHS

Violence by adolescent people is one of the most visible forms of violence in society. Around the world, newspapers and the broadcast media report daily on violence by gangs, in schools or by adolescent people on the streets. The main victims and perpetrators of such violence, virtually everywhere, are themselves adolescents and adolescent adults (1). Homicide and non-fatal assaults involving adolescent people contribute greatly to the ecumenical encumbrance of premature death, injury and incapacitation.

Youth violence deeply harms not only its victims but additionally their families, friends and communities. Its effects are optically discerned not only in death, illness and incapacitation but withal in terms of the quality of life.  Violence involving puerile people integrates greatly to the costs of health and welfare accommodations, reduces productivity, decreases the value of property, disrupts a range of essential accommodations and generally undermines the fabric of society.

The quandary of youth violence cannot be viewed in isolation from other quandary comportments. Belligerent puerile people incline to commit a range of malefactions. They withal often exhibit other quandaries, such as truancy and dropping out of school, substance abuse, compulsive being mendacious, temerarious driving and high rates of sexually transmitted diseases. However, not all bellicose youths have paramount quandaries other than their violence and not all puerile people with quandaries are indispensably belligerent.

There are proximate links between youth violence and other forms of violence. Witnessing violence in the domicile or being physically or sexually abused, for instance, may condition children or adolescents to regard violence as acceptable designates of resolving quandaries. Protracted exposure to armed conflicts may additionally contribute to a general culture of terror that increments the incidence of youth violence.  Understanding the factors that increase the peril of puerile people being the victims or perpetrators of violence is essential for developing efficacious policies and programmes to avert violence.

Without a doubt, today’s generation of youths is a deeply troubled one. What is abaft this crisis?

DEFINITION OF YOUTH:

Youths are defined as people between the ages of 10 and 29 years. High rates of offending and victimisation nevertheless often elongate as far as the 30 - 35 years shocking incidents like these are not isolated events. They cannot be brushed off as mere aberrations. “Youth violence is a major quandary in our society.

WHAT IS YOUTH VIOLENCE?

Youth violence refers to deleterious demeanours that can commence early and perpetuate into puerile adulthood. The adolescent person can be a victim, an offender, or a witness to the violence. Youth violence includes sundry comportments.

While School violence is any form of truculent activity or activities inside the school premises. It includes bullying, physical abuses, fulminations, brawl, shooting etc. Bullying and physical abuses are the most prevalent forms of violence that is associated with school violence.

Juvenile delinquency, otherwise kenned as "juvenile offending", is participation in illicit comportment by minors (juveniles, i.e. individuals younger than the statutory age of majority). Most licit systems prescribe categorical procedures for dealing with juveniles, such as juvenile detention centers, and courts.

This violence comes in several forms and shapes that indeed affect many out their target. This is what rocks Niger Delta of Nigeria mostly, that one marginally senses their aim and destinations. From nothing, they commence to a profoundly and immensely colossal crisis that consumes many including their parents. Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni Local Regime Area of Rivers State of Nigeria remains a reference point. Adolescent men of the communities aimlessly kill people and ravage homes and committing other atrocities. A lot of people are scared to peregrinate to the habitation town from where they take as their safe haven.

Though, the youth quandary is the world over but predominant in some area of the globe. But not all youth violence in the Cumulated States is directed at other students. “Over the 5-year period from 1997 through 2001,” the same source reports, “teachers were victims of approximately 1.3 million nonfatal malefactions at school, including 817,000 larcenies and 473,000 violence malefactions.” Furthermore, “9 percent of all elementary and secondary scholastic edifiers were threatened with injury by a student, and 4 percent were physically assailed by a student.”

It is quoted that “China apprehended 69,780 juvenile delinquents in 2003,” reports one news agency, “an increase of 12.7 percent over 2002.” The news item notes that “gang malefactions accounted for 70 percent of juvenile delinquency.” A report from Japan in 2003 similarly verbalized that youths were responsible for half the malefactions committed in the preceding ten years.

DRUG ADDICTION, REMAINS A CATALYST

Further evidence of trouble involves the assault that many adolescent ones are making against their own bodies. A report by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse states that about a moiety of all teenagers in that land have endeavored an illicit drug afore culminating high school. The report integrates: “Alcohol use remains prodigiously widespread among today’s teenagers. Proximately four out of every five students (77%) have consumed alcohol (more than just a few sips) by the cessation of high school; and proximately half (46%) have done so by 8th grade.”

 

LOOSE SEX

In this age of AVAILS, promiscuous sex is indisputably perilous. Yet, many youths seem to view sex as minute more than an innocuous game. Some American youths, for example, blithely verbalize of “hooking up”, an innocuous-sounding euphemism for casual sex. They verbalize about having “a friend with benefits”, a sexual partner who makes no emotional demands.

Shocking? Not to experts who have studied teenage sexual deportment. “Over the past 20 years,” it is exposed a position that the average age for teenagers engaging in sexual activity grow younger and younger. It is no longer unorthodox to find boys and girls starting out as adolescent as 12 years of age.”

Such views on sex have made inroads elsewhere. “Asia’s youth are becoming increasingly susceptible to HIV through heterosexual relationships with many becoming sexually active at a younger age,” reports UNESCO, integrating: “Teenagers are increasingly shirking their parents’ ‘Asian values’ by having premarital sex, often with multiple partners.”

Further designations of youthful distress: Canada’s Women’s Health Weekly reports: “Twenty-five percent of females between ages 16 and 19 will experience an episode of major despondence. However, dejection is an illness that afflicts both sexes. According to U.S. News & World Report, every year up to five thousand puerile people kill themselves. For some reason, the report notes, “boys kill themselves six times more often than do girls.